Longtime Vatican journalist and Crux editor John Allen died Thursday after protracted suffering with cancer.
He is mourned by those who knew and respected him around the world, and especially at the Vatican.
I did not know John well. I had a couple of lunches with him, and we once spoke together on a panel about the life of Luigi Giussani, at which I was impressed by his breadth of knowledge and historical experience.
We work in the same circles, and I have long noted the breadth of respect for John, from across the American ecclesiastical spectrum.
I think much of that came because John pioneered something in contemporary Church life: The idea that the Church could be covered in depth from a perspective that was neither cloying piety nor dismissive skepticism; that it could be considered the proper subject for proper journalism, understood and evaluated on its own terms, and by its own self-understanding, rather than by the imposition of ideologies or by broad and unoriginal presumptions about religion and religious people.
Early in my journalism career, I recall a specific story broken by Crux, which came obviously through John’s work to develop sources, and I was inspired to see a template for the kind of work I hoped to do. I suspect many journalists can point to similar experiences.
At The Pillar, we did not always agree with John Allen’s conclusions, and we said so sometimes quite directly. But that doesn’t change that the ground for our own journalism project was in important ways broken and spaded by his own long career. That’s true for a generation of journalists who aim to cover the Church intelligently and objectively.
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His death offers a moment for sober reflection about what any of this is for.
None of us can escape our mortality. No matter how much we might push it from our minds, there is no exception for us from the last and final things we must confront.
And his death is a reminder that ever-looming mortality is what any of our coverage about Vatican politics or papal tea leaves is really about: A religion which reminds us that we will die, and that we need each of us a savior, and that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
If those facts weren’t true, none of us should care about the day-to-day machinations and movements of the Church — they matter only inasmuch as the Church is the sacrament of our salvation, and that Christ is the answer to the existential questions which plague the human heart.
More than I knew John, I know his widow, Elise Allen, with whom I worked at Catholic News Agency. I know that, in the words of St. Paul, she does not “mourn as those who have no hope.”
Nevertheless, I commend her to your prayers, that she be consoled in this moment of grieving. And I ask that you pray for the soul of John Allen, that he might walk now in eternal beatitude.
I always made a point to read his stories, even if I knew I probably wouldn't agree with his viewpoint. (But I did sometimes!) He was one of the few, and maybe the last, left-of-center Catholic journalist who I thought wrote fair and balanced stories with serious insight into current events in the Church. Catholic journalism is worse off with his passing. RIP.
He coined the phrase, “affirmative orthodoxy,” which I find highly useful and surprisingly descriptive.